Slimm Calhoun - “It’s OK”: Here’s what I said about this one on Freaky Trigger at the time - “Another day, another magnificent hip-hop single. It’s almost easy to take this year’s embarrassment of riches for granted: things are so good right now that you can almost lie back and pretend nothing astonishing’s happening at all, almost waste your time fretting over album rock or indie sevens or snidey back-and-forthing over Britney and Christina. Almost. But what’s goin’ on is this: hip-hop, having struggled to prominence commercially and artistically, is now where rock was 35 years ago, unstoppable and untoppable, bossing the chart and using the freedom of the Top 40 as a slingshot to double its acceleration, to gloriously bastardise itself, to gobble up rock, pop, rave, disco, and dance just like it used to eat up dusty funk records and old breaks. The world is its crate.”
Which was all very well, but as my total dodge away from the specifics of “It’s OK” suggests, the problem was that I hadn’t found a way of writing well about hip-hop. I was hardly alone in this: the online critosphere in 2000 might or might not have liked rap music but lovers and haters alike were pretty terrible at describing it. (FT was lucky: we had Tim Finney, and a guy called Greg Scarth, who I lost touch with when he went to university but whose hip-hop posts on NYLPM were excellent.) One of the really positive stories of music writing this decade was the emergence of hip-hop blogs, at around the time MP3 blogs became prominent.
Personally I still feel rap’s the thing I’m worst at writing about - an invisible collar and tie clamps round my throat and the words won’t come. This song - a Dungeon Family solo turn with a cameo by a pitched up Andre 3000 - is still a really great bit of playful videogame funk, though.
